45 Years After RFK Assassination Retrospective: Who Killed RFK?

On June 5, 1968, U.S. Senator from New York and 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was mysteriously gunned down in California. And in his 1976 book Heartland, comedian Mort Sahl made the following reference to RFK:

"Two personal friends of Robert Kennedy, one of whom had been his roommate in college, at the request of the Kennedy family, got in touch with Jim Garrison and attended the preliminary hearing of Clay Shaw. They said that Bobby would wait until he was in a position to be relatively assured of the Presidency and then would get deeper into the case and get the guys who killed Jack. Guys. They used the plural. Garrison said to me later he'll be dead if he wins the California primary..."

Coincidentally, a 1975 essay by Allard Lowenstein which appeared in Government By Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today, entitled "Who Killed Robert Kennedy?", observed:

"This year several Stern magazine reporters conducted an extended investigation. Stern is a leading...German newsweekly. Their findings were detailed in a cover story entitled, `The Real Murderer [of Robert Kennedy] is Still Free.' Those findings were not reported in the United States."

(Aquarian Weekly 6/5/96)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: 4 Conspiracies Against JFK?

Long before Oliver Stone made his JFK movie, former Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy apparently believed that JFK was eliminated by a conspiracy on November 22, 1963. As comedian Mort Sahl recalled in his 1976 book Heartland:

"In an effort to recruit some muscle for [Jim] Garrison, because I was probably the only well-known name on his side, I went to Washington and spoke with Gene McCarthy. `What about the trial?' McCarthy said. `There wasn't only one conspiracy against Jack. There were four. But nobody wants to deal with it...'

In the same book, Sahl also noted that when he spoke with 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern around the same time, "McGovern said, `well I think the Warren Report is a lot of crap.'"

(Aquarian Weekly 5/15/96)


30 People Involved In JFK Assassination Plot?

"The Sulzberger Dynasty's New York Times may still be reporting that only one person was responsible for the November 22, 1963 murder of JFK in Dallas. Yet Granma (9/15/93) noted in the early 1990s that "General Fabian Escalante, director for the Cuban Center for National Security Studies tated that `according to Lopez Estrada, an expert on the CIA, the Dallas assassination must have been committed by approximately 30 persons."

(Downtown 10/18/95)

Hidden History of Texas: 1996-2011--Part 20

(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 20, 2013)

When George W. Bush became the Republican Governor of Texas, “he arrived indebted to dozens of industries and wealthy patrons” and “repaid some of his supporters with choice political appointments,” according to the Center for Public Integrity’s The Buying of the President 2000.
The same book indicated what the political situation was like in Texas state politics in 2000 -- before Texas’s governor moved into the White House in 2001 after receiving fewer popular votes than the Democratic Party candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election:

"One of the most prestigious political appointments is a seat on the University of Texas board of Regents. The board is filled with Bush’s top-dollar donors. The chair of the UT Regents is Donald Evans, Bush’s old friend and longtime fund-raiser who, as the finance chairman for Bush’s presidential bid, has overseen the campaign’s record-shattering fund-raising drive. Evans is the chief executive officer of Tom Brown, Inc., an oil and gas company based in Midland, Texas.

"In 1989, Bush joined the board as an outside director. He received $12,000 a year plus stock options for attending several meetings and participating in conference calls... Shortly after he was elected governor of Texas, Bush sold his Tom Brown holdings for a profit of $297,550.

"Another regent and top Bush patron is A.R. `Tony’ Sanchez, the chairman and chief executive of Sanchez-O’Brien Oil and Gas Corporation... Sanchez and his mother also own a controlling stake in International Bancshares Corporation, the holding company of International Bank of Commerce, a Texas banking chain founded by his father in 1966. Over [George W.] Bush’s career, Sanchez, members of his family, and employees of his companies have given him at least $230,150, making them his No. 2 career patron…

"Bush owed few people more than Richard Rainwater, the Fort Worth financier... Rainwater launched an investment company in 1994, Crescent Real Estate Equities Company... In 1997, Bush backed a plan to cut state property taxes that would have saved Crescent some $2.5 million in state taxes... Later that year,...Bush signed a bill into law that produced a $10 million windfall for Crescent... Dallas taxpayers were to foot most of the bill for the new sports arena…Rainwater, through Crescent, bought a 12 percent stake in the Mavericks. Under the purchase agreement, Crescent will get $10 million when the arena is completed…

"The Texas Teachers’ Retirement System...sold two office buildings and a mortgage on a third to Crescent in 1996 and 1997 at a $70.4 million loss... At the time of at least one of the sales, Bush owned about $100,000 worth of Crescent stock... The University of Texas Investment Management Company [UTIMCO]...has steered close to $1.7 billion of its assets into private investments; a third of that money has gone into funds run either by...[UTIMCO Chairman Hicks]’s business partner or by Bush patrons...

"Industries that have provided the bulk of Bush’s campaign contributions have gotten his help in a variety of endeavors, from staving off pesky environmental regulations and shielding themselves from consumer lawsuits to driving off meddlesome investigators... According to a study by Public Research Works, Bush raised $566,000 from...polluters for his two gubernatorial campaigns. And from March 4, 1999 to March 31, 1999 Bush raised $316,300... They included: Enron ( Bush’s No. 1 career patron); Vinson & Elkins (Bush’s No. 3 career patron), a law firm that represents Enron and Alcoa, a...polluter; and companies owned by the Bass family (Bush’s No. 5 career patron)."

And, coincidentally, some of the same ultra-rich folks who bankrolled former Texas governor Bush’s campaigns in the 1990s have apparently been donating a lot of money in the 21st-century to fund the campaigns of the current governor of Texas, former 2012 GOP presidential primaries candidate Rick Perry.

Between 2001 and Oct. 23, 2010, for example, Perry (a former U.S. Air Force officer who is the son of former Haskell County Commissioner Ray Perry) received $337,027 in campaign contributions from Lee Bass, $100,000 in campaign contributions from Sid Bass, and 265,000 in campaign contributions from Ray Hunt, according to the Texans for Public Justice website.

The same website also recalled that “as Texas' longest-serving governor, Rick Perry raised $98.9 million from 2001 through Oct. 23, 2010,” and that “Perry raised almost $49 million (or 50 percent of this money) from 193 mega donors who gave him $100,000 or more.”

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 465,622 to 656,562; and the number of people who lived in the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area increased from 846,227 to 1,249,763 during the same period.

According to the “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell’” essay by Cathy Schechter that appeared in Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas, between 1990 and 2000, Austin ’s Jewish-affiliated population also increased from 5,000 “to more than 10,000," and “by 2002, the American Jewish Yearbook estimated the city’s Jewish population at 13,500.”

But “the appearance of young `Dellionaire’ Jews who made millions in the brave new world of high-technology took the mellow Austin Jewish community by surprise.” Yet by 2007, Texas billionaire Michael Dell -- with an estimated personal wealth that year of $17.2 billion -- was the wealthiest ultra-rich person in Texas .

But in 2007 Robert Bass was still worth $5.5 billion, Ray Hunt was worth $4 billion, Sid and Lee Bass were worth $3 billion, and Ed Bass was worth $2.5 billion, according to Bryan Burrough's The Big Rich. The same book also noted that in 2007, coincidentally, “Hunt Oil received a lucrative concession to drill in northern Iraq,” and “Sid Bass, whose family, along with the Hunts, ranked among Bush’s largest financial backers, was photographed alongside the president, Laura Bush, and the queen of England...”

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Who Used `Bishop' Cover Name?

There is apparently some evidence that a CIA employee named "Bishop," who apparently paid Antonio Veciana $253,000...was a former CIA official named David Phillips. As the Appendix To Hearings Before The House Select Committee On Assassinations (Vol. 10) revealed:

"Investigators interviewed a former career agent for the CIA, who for present purposes will be called Ron Cross. From September 1960 until November 1962, Cross was a case officer at the CIA's JM/WAVE station...

"When asked by the committee if he was familiar with anyone using the cover name of Bishop at the JM/WAVE station, Cross said he was almost positive that David Phillips had used the cover name of...Bishop."

Oswald And The CIA by Professor John Newman observed in the early 1990s that "it is fitting that one of the agency's legendary disinformation artists, David Atlee Phillips, should have been in charge of the CIA's counter-intelligence and propaganda effort against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee" and "what the operation tells us is that the agency was sufficiently interested in countering the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to engage in illegal domestic operations..." A number of U.S. writers have asserted that Oswald was attempting to infiltrate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee on behalf of the CIA, prior to apparently being framed by CIA-linked people as their "patsy" for the JFK assassination.

(Downtown 7/19/95)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: NBC's 1967 `Case Of Jim Garrison' Special Revisited

On June 19, 1967 NBC broadcast a 60-minute special on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation of the JFK assassination, entitled "The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison," but "only allowed Garrison to be interviewed for less than two minutes," according to The Kennedy Conspiracy by Paris Flammonde. On July 13, 1967, however, Garrison was finally allowed by NBC to speak to tv viewers for a half-hour and he said the following:


"...Many things that some of the major news agencies have been telling you are untrue...Although you are citizens of the United States, information concerning the cause of the death of your President [JFK] has been withheld from you...President Kennedy was not killed by a lone assassin...There has been, and continues to be, a concerted effort to keep you from learning these facts...

"...The conclusion of the Warren Report, that President Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, is a fairy tale.

"...This country was not built on the idea that a handful of nobles, whether located in our federal agencies, in Washington, D.C., or in the ews agencies in New York, should decide what was good for the people to know, and what they should not know. This is a totalitarian concept, which presumes that the leaders of our federal government, and the men in control of the powerful press media, constitute a special elite..."

As long ago as May 16, 19067, Garrison told a New Orleans newspaper reporter the following:

"The point is that Clay Shaw and Lee Oswald have the same post-office box number in their address book and this is, in coded form, the unpublished phone number of Jack Ruby in 1963...

"We have had evidence for some time that in Dallas, Texas, Jack Ruby was working for the CIA at the same time Lee Oswald was working for the CIA here (in New Orleans).

"This means that the CIA well knew that these two men knew each other. We also have evidence that Lee Oswald was not the only man in Dealey Plaza who was an employee of the CIA and now we have found the phone number of the CIA in front of Lee Oswald's address book..."

In an October 1967 Playboy magazine itnerview, Garrison also observed that "there are also 51 CIA documents classified toop secret in the National Archives pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby" and "in practice, any documents the CIA wanted classified wasa shunted into the Archives without any examination by the sleeping beauties on the [Warren] Commission..."

(Downtown 4/95)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Jack Ruby's CIA Connection?

The man who who eliminated Lee Oswald on nationwide tv on November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby, was apparently connected to the CIA, according to the now-deceased former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. In the October 1967 issue of Playboy magazine, for instance, Garrison stated:

"Ruby appears to have been the CIA's bagman for a wide variety of anti-Castro adventures. In this connection, let me point out that one of the documents classified top secret in the Archives is a CIA file entitled `The Activities of Jack Ruby.' Perhaps this will become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in September 2038."

As early as 1967, The Kennedy Conspiracy: An Uncommissioned Report On The Jim Garrison Investigation by Paris Flammonde noted the following:

"District Attorney Jim Garrison bases his belief that Ruby was involved in a well-organized conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy on the following points: (1) Ruby knew Oswald; (2) Ruby knew Clay Shaw; (3) Ruby knew David Ferrie; (4) he was involved in smuggling guns to anti-Castro rebels in Cuba; (5) he was intimately involved with right-wing anti-Castro exile groups in Dallas; (6) he was a friend of General Walker; (7) he had indicated in letters smuggled out of prison that he belonged to a conspiracy; (8) he was acquainted before the Kennedy conspiracy with Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit; and (9) he was a part-time employee of the Central Intelligence Agency."

(Downtown 2/15/95)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: LBJ's Memo To General Cabell

Prior to being fired by JFK following the CIA's 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, former Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell's brother--then-CIA Deputy Director (Gen.) Charles Cabell--apparently was warned by then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson that JFK intended to decrease the CIA's power in Washington, D.C. As former CIA operative Robert Morrow revealed in his early 1990s book First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated In The CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy:


"On Sunday, April 24, 1961, one week after the fiasco on the beaches, I received a call from [former CIA official] Tracy Barnes...He requested that I meet him at the Golden Parrot in Washington for lunch on Monday...I agreed to see General Charles Cabell and was in his office one hour after leaving the Golden Parrot...A third man was with Cabell when Barnes and I entered his office. He was introduced as the Deputy Director of Plans for the Agency, Richard Bissell.

"The General did not waste time with further amenities and chatter...

"`Well, young man, I assume Tracy has told you about the Agency's problems with the White House.'...

"He then reached into his top desk drawer, removed a large file folder and handed it to me.

"The first item I removed from the folder was a memorandum, handwritten on the official stationery created exclusively for the vice-president of the United States. Beneath the stationery's engraved: `Office of the Vice President of the United States,' the salutation read: `My dear Charles':

"...After a number of critical, self-serving comments abaout the intention of the president and his brother to build a Kennedy dynasty in the White House, Lyndon Johnson proceeded forthrightly to the crux of his message.

"The vice-president had learned, `strictly by accident' of the secret directives issued to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara by President Kennedy...McNamara was ordered to employ any and all means at his disposal, which would result in the revocation of the CIA's power...McNamara was further authorized to establish an alternative intelligence agency...

"Immediately beneath the last-written line were the vice-president's initials, `LBJ'."

Morrow also recalled that, after being shown LBJ's memo to the soon-to-be-axed CIA deputy director, he was allowed to "read through numerous reports dealing with everything from unsavory campaign tactics authorized by Kennedy to surveillance reports which explicitly detailed the manner in which he [JFK] occupied many of his nights," during the next half-hour.

Coincidentally, prior to former CIA Deputy Director [Gen.] Cabell's 1971 death, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was apparently preparing to accuse the former deputy CIA director of "conspiring to assassinate" JFK.

(Downtown 1/18/95)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Why JFK Chose LBJ As VP

The U.S. president whose Warren Commission issued a report which apparently covered-up what actually happened in Dallas nearly 50 years ago was Lyndon Johnson. He apparently wasa chosen to be JFK's running mate in 1960 not because of any special qualifications for the U.S. presidency. As Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers noted in the early 1990s:

"For John Kennedy, a key factor in giving Johnson the vice-presidential slot was the threat of ruinous sex revelations, revelations that would have destroyed the `American family man' image so carefully seeded in the national mind, and snatched the presidency from his grasp. The blackmailers, by this account, were Johnson himself--and [J.] Edgar [Hoover].

"The new information comes from Evelyn Lincoln, John ennedy's personal secretary for 12 years...

"[Evelyn] Lincoln's diary, covering most of her Kennedy service, remains locked in a deposit box...

"During their day of decision over the vice-presidency...John [Kennedy] paced up and down and Robert [Kennedy] slumped on a bed. [Evelyn] Lincoln moved in and out of the room with messages. She heard enough, she says, to understand that Edgar's smear information on Kennedy was at the heart of the dilemma. `It was the information J. Edgar Hoover passed to Johnson--about womanizing, and things in Joe Kennedy's background...Johnson was using that as clout.'..."

(Downtown 11/23/94)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Revisiting The Warren Report

As Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs noted, "the Warren Commission Report was made public on September 28, 1964, with the news media voicing virtually unanimous praise and support for the document."

Yet the same book asserted:

"The Warren Commission was in part the result of an attempt by President Lyndon Johnson and his close advisors to blunt independent assassination investigations both in Texas and in Congress.

"Johnson hand-picked commission members--all of whom had long-standing connections with either the military, defense industries, or U.S. intelligence...

"...There were serious conflicts between the commission's pat report and its attendant 26 volumes of testimony and evidence. Likewise, there were serious conflicts between witness testimony as published by the commission and statements to newsmen and researchers by those same witnesses..."

Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba and the Garrison Case by James DiEugenio also stated the following in reference to the U.S. Establishment's official version of what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas:

"Finally what sinks the Warren Report is its lack of respect for itself and the reader. We are asked to believe a string of happenstance, improbabilities, incongruities, and flat-out impossibilities...

"...To convict the dead Oswald, the commission could mold the alleged facts to fit its portrait of the accused...

"Yet it served its purpose. It incriminated a lone assassin and shoved the issue under the table for the 1964 election...

"The American people have been lied to before, but the Warren Report moved this phenomenon to a higher plane. The lie was so big, the attendant praise was so lavish, the holes in the story so gaping, thatit quickly sparked a countermovement to the official story..."

(Downtown 9/21/94)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Did KGB Report On JFK Assassination Question Warren Report's Conclusions?

Unlike the Warren Commission, the KGB in Russia apparently concluded that Lee Oswald was affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency prior to JFK's mysterious death on November 22, 1963: As Dr. Cyril Wecht noted in his book Cause of Death:

"I was secretly supplied with a copy of the KGB's official report on Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination...

"According to notes in the file, the KGB believed that Oswald was a spy for the CIA...when he sought shelter in the Soviet Union in 1959...

"One document states that Oswald was taught Russian by the military intelligence division...The summary states that, according to intelligence reports in a separate KGB file on the Kennedy assassination, there is evidence that factions within the American intelligence community...played a role in the assassination...

"...I found it quite ironic that the KGB was willing to open its files regarding the Kennedy assassination, but our own government refuses to do the same..."

Cause of Death also observed:

"There are several, fascinating places to visit in Dallas to learn more about the assassination of the president [JFK]: The JFK Assassination Information Center, headed by Larry Howard, a key critic and researcher, has the best collection and organization of evidence that contradicts the Warren Commission's conclusions. It is located in a retail shopping center two blocks from Dealey Plaza. There is also a great tour bus that operates out of the center and takes visitors through every step Oswald is supposed to have made that day...

"What this case needs is a special prosecutor...

"I do not believe the Department of Justice and its sister organization, the FBI, have any interest in solving this case...

"One day, the American public will know the truth about who killed their president [JFK] and why..."


(Downtown 7/27/94)

Hidden History of Texas: 1974-1995--Part 19

(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 7, 2013)

During the 1970s and early 1980s the folks who inherited the oil industry-based wealth of ultra-rich white Texans like Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt continued to make big money -- and to use that big money to exercise a special influence in both Texas state politics and U.S. national politics.

As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich observed:

"For the state’s actual oilmen, the party that began with the 1973 [Arab oil] embargo, ran for 5 solid years. Drilling boomed. Profits mushroomed. Then, in 1978, things got even better... In just 7 short years prices rose 2,000 percent... By 1976...the children of H.L. Hunt’s two Dallas families and the corporations they controlled, were thriving as never before.

"Thanks in large part to rising oil prices, the Hunts were probably the world’s wealthiest family... Their net worth hovered in the $6 billion to $8 billion range, easily topping the next wealthiest American families, the Mellons and Rockefellers...

"The most successful Hunt during the 1970s was Ray, who began making over his father’s old Hunt Oil Company much as his Reunion project was changing the face of downtown Dallas... In 3 short years he quadrupled the size of Hunt Oil’s staff, increased its offshore leases from 100,000 to 1 million acres... Ray started a new magazine just for Dallas, D... By 1982 Texas Oil had luxuriated in a solid 10 years of record-high prices..."

And, coincidentally, the sixth-largest contributor of campaign funds for one of Texas’s representatives in the U.S. Senate during the 1980s and 1990s, Phil Gramm, came from the Bass Enterprises investment firm that the Bass family relatives of Sid Richardson formed after Richardson’s death, while the seventh-largest contributor of campaign funds for former U.S. Senator Gramm during this period was Ray Hunt’s Hunt Corporation, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s 1996 book, The Buying of the President.

But once the demand and market price for oil began to drop after 1982, many of the independent local oil companies in Texas began to lose money or go out of business; and many could not pay off the loans that major banks in Texas had given them during the boom years of the 1970s and early 1980s. So “in October 1983... First National of Midland collapsed” and “in the next decade 9 of the 10 largest Texas banks would follow suit,” according to The Big Rich.

In 1981, membership in the Texas labor union locals that were affiliated with the Texas AFL-CIO had “peaked at more than 290,000," according to the www.texasaflcio.org website. But the number of Texas workers who were Texas AFL-CIO-affiliated union members “then dropped dramatically during the oil bust of the 1980s;” and by 1995 membership was just 197,462, according to the Texas AFL-CIO’s website.

By the end of the 1980s many of the deregulated Savings and Loan (S&L) thrift institutions in Texas’s banking industry also had collapsed in a big way, after “real estate developers bought thrifts so they could have a private piggy bank to finance office buildings and condos no one needed,” “con artists set up loan scams and used thrifts to launder money,” and “thrift executives cooked the books and paid themselves high bonuses when their banks were actually losing money,” according to the 1991 edition of Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.

As The Buying of the President observed in 1996, “Texas has the unpleasant distinction of topping the list of states with the most S&L failures with 65,” and “the state was second only to California in terms of the value of assets held by failed thrifts: California thrifts had $18,358 billion in assets compared with Texas’s $18,279 billion.”

And, coincidentally, the U.S. president who signed the S&L industry bail-out bill in 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush, was both a former Texas oil industry and banking executive and the father of Neil Bush -- who was sued by federal regulators “for regulation violations that allegedly contributed to the $1 billion collapse of Silverado Banking, a Denver thrift,” according to Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.

Between 1974 and 1995 another son of the U.S. President who launched Gulf War I against Iraq in early 1991 (who, himself, would become the governor of Texas in 1995 and the U.S. President who launched both the endless U.S. war in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the endless U.S. war in Iraq in March 2003) -- George W. Bush II -- also worked as an executive in Texas’s oil industry.

Before joining with the Bass family’s former money manager and other business partners to purchase the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989, former Republican Texas Governor Bush was an executive at the Harken Oil and Gas firm that both Harvard University and the ultra-rich Bass family financially backed.

Another ultra-rich Texas billionaire, Ross Perot, was able to exercise a special influence on the direction of U.S. presidential politics during the 1990s -- by spending $65 million of his surplus personal wealth to finance his own 1992 campaign to gain control of the White House -- for which over 19.7 million U.S. voters cast ballots in November, 1992 (and for which over 7.8 million U.S. voters also cast ballots in November, 1996).

Perot had gained his initial big wealth in 1966 after his private family business, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), suddenly became super-profitable when Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross -- whose computer/data processing department Perot then headed -- received a lucrative contract from the U.S. government’s Social Security Administration to develop a computerized system for paying the Medicare bills;” and Perot’s Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross employer then gave Perot’s private EDS firm “a subcontract to take over their data processing on the new Medicare program using, of course, the system just developed at government expense” (by the same firm whose computer/data processing department Perot headed), according to a November 1971 Ramparts magazine article.

And it was also during the 1974 to 1995 period of Texas history that a Democrat, Ann Richards, was the governor of Texas (between 1991 and 1995), and that more than 70 people were killed on April 19, 1993, following a 51-day siege and an armed attack by U.S. federal government law enforcement agents on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Columbia University's Rockefeller-Trimble Military and Advanced Systems' Connection: Trilateral Commission's Merit Janow Named Columbia SIPA Dean--Conclusion

“In his 1976 book, The Control of Oil, the former Chief Economist of the Senate Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopoly, John Blair, noted that in 1938 the Rockefeller family held directly or indirectly, 20 percent of Exxon’s stock, 16 percent of Mobil’s stock, 11 percent of Standard Oil of Indiana/Amoco’s stock and 12 percent of Standard Oil of California (SOCAL)/Chevron’s stock. In 1974, according to the book Everybody’s Business, the Rockefeller family still owned 1 percent of all Exxon stock (worth $156.7 million), 1.7 percent of Mobil’s stock (worth $63.6 million), .2 percent of Standard Oil of Indiana/Amoco stock (worth $11.7 million) and 2 percent of Standard Oil of California (SOCAL)/Chevron stock (worth $$85.3 million). In addition, Trilateral Commission Founder David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank owned 1.5 percent of SOCAL/Chevron’s stock in 1980.”

--Downtown (l2/12/90)

“…The Rockefeller clan – there are 242 of them, including spouses and minors – has endured as a powerful force…ExxonMobil stock is the single biggest holding of some family members…”

--from a May 2, 2008 Financial Times article by Chrystia Freeland


“One area of Rockefeller & Co. know-how has been built out of the Rockefeller family's 50-year record of integrating environmental, social, and governance concerns into its portfolio and investment decisions...Rockefeller targets families with $30 million; new clients are generally subject to a minimum $100,000 annual fee…”

--from a September 15, 2012 Barron’s.com article by Richard C. Morais

“In 1978, the year Charles Trimble founded Trimble Navigation, the original NAVSTAR satellite was launched, giving the U.S. government its first reference point for a worldwide radio-navigation system that became known as GPS, or Global Positioning System…GPS was developed to meet military needs…The U.S. government invested $12 billion in the project...GPS first earned its admirers during the Persian Gulf War, a time when, not coincidentally, Trimble Navigation captured the interest of industry observers….During Operation Desert Storm, Trimble Navigation provided troops with Trimpacks, devices that enabled soldiers to pinpoint their location. The hand-held receivers performed admirably, earning praise from military commanders and making Trimble Navigation an attractive prospect for investors...When sales in 1990 reached $63.3 million, the announcement fanned investor interest in the company. The figure exceeded Wall Street analysts' expectations by roughly 25 percent, prompting investors to look closer at the Sunnyvale, California-based enterprise. What they saw was a company controlling 60 percent of a market whose revenue volume was more than doubling annually….They saw a company whose orders for Trimpack receivers totaled $40 million between October 1990 and March 1991. Trimble Navigation's stock value soared as a result...Military sales…had fueled the company's meteoric rise in 1990 and 1991…”
--from the Gale Directory of Company Histories

“GPS…is a crucial wartime technology for U.S. forces in Iraq.
“The military relies on the Global Positioning System to direct the kind of precision-guided "smart bombs" that were used in the opening air assault on Iraq…GPS receivers also are widely deployed among ground forces, allowing them to better navigate the desert terrain and track their precise locations, even during blinding sandstorms.

“…Before the full GPS system was operational, the United States used laser-guided bombs that were affected by rain, clouds and sandstorms. But in Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2002, the United States deployed a new generation of GPS-guided bombs…”

--from a March 20, 2003 San Francisco Chronicle article

“Trimble Military and Advanced Systems Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., (FA8807-13-D-0017) is being awarded a $6,712,500 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for acquisition of Trimble GPS receivers. The location of the performance is Sunnyvale, Calif. Work is expected to be completed by December 2017. The contracting activity is SMC/GPK, Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif. Contract involves Foreign Military Sales. (Air Force Contract).”

– from a Dec. 10, 2012 U.S. Department of Defense press release

“The School of International Affairs (SIA) has become, in the space of a. few years, one of Columbia's largest, and most important divisions….In 1967, the School listed a Faculty and staff of over 150 members, which included some of the most prestigious -- and powerful -- figures in the Columbia community….. The purpose of the SIA has never been in doubt: to train experts in international affairs and foreign areas for administrative positions in America's expanding overseas empire…. “



--from NACLA’s 1968 pamphlet, Who Rules Columbia?

Columbia University’s Rockefeller-Trimble Military and Advanced Systems’ Connection: Trilateral Commission’s Merit Janow Named Columbia SIPA Dean—Conclusion

For nearly 100 years, Trilateral Commission founder David Rockefeller Sr. and other members of the Rockefeller Dynasty have obtained and retained much wealth and special influence in the world of U.S. business, politics, culture and higher education as a result of their family ownership—or control via their various “non-profit” foundations, banks or family investment firms—of stock in U.S.-based transnational oil/energy corporations like ExxonMobil and Chevron/Texaco/Unocal.

And according to a 13 FHR filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission [SEC] for the period ending March 31, 2013 made by the Rockefeller & Co./Rockefeller Financial Services firm on whose board of directors the new Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs [SIPA] dean—Trilateral Commission member Merit Janow—has sat in recent years, over $173 million worth of Chevron/Texaco/Unocal stock and over $92 million worth of ExxonMobil stock are currently owned or controlled by Rockefeller & Co./Rockefeller Financial Services.

In addition, the stock portfolio of Rockefeller & Co./Rockefeller Financial Services includes large chunks of stock in corporations such as Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, Apache Corporation, Apple, Boeing, BP, Coca-Cola, Comcast, Con Edison, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, IBM, Merck, Royal Dutch Shell, Wells Fargo, Wal-Mart and Trimble Navigation Limited/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems (on whose board of directors Columbia SIPA Dean Janow has also sat in recent years).

Coincidentally, Trimble Military and Advanced Systems has apparently manufactured weapons that were used by the U.S. military to wage war overseas since 2001 on behalf of the special corporate interests of transnational oil/energy corporations such as Chevron/Texaco/Unocal and ExxonMobil, in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. On May 13, 2002, for example, Trimble Navigation/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems was awarded a $2.1 million military development contract to supply GPS technology for Raytheon’s Miniature Airborne GPS Receiver MAGR 2000 for use in a variety of U.S. and Allied military aircraft including the MG-53E Sea Dragon, F016 Fighting Falcon, and E-2c Hawkeye. And on September 26, 2002, Trimble was also awarded a contract from Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), Special Missions Branch. (end of article)

Columbia University's Rockefeller-Trimble Military and Advanced Systems' Connection: Trilateral Commission's Merit Janow Named Columbia SIPA Dean--Part 2

“[Former Democratic President] Carter’s close ties with David Rockefeller, the Eastern Establishment and Trilateral Commission—certainly known to many New York Times writers—were also never reported, although the story was certainly important. In fact, the absence of reporting on Carter’s connections led one distinguished panel of judges to label `Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission’ to be the best censored story of 1976, the most important story during that year that the entire American media systematically failed to cover…

“The Trilateral Commissioners were—and still are—a very elite group, members by invitation only, with a majority composed of multinational businessmen and corporate lawyers. All were chosen directly or indirectly by Rockefeller…”

--from Lawrence Shoup’s 1980 book, The Carter Presidency and Beyond

“Spelling it all out, so that…even professors can understand, the Rockefeller Operation boils down to the following:…A huge fortune, illicitly amassed, is doled out in part over a span of many years in a variety of projects…Managerial…elements benefiting personally from each project naturally become Rockefeller boosters…The Rockefellers avoid taxes…A further gain in funding tax-deductible projects…is that…one has…the privilege of…decreeing what shall and what shall not be…supported…A vast fortune is retained through the generations and is so managed as to confer great…economic clout from one generation to the next…Anyone who presumes to criticize the operation is countered by the technique of…public relations officers and the outcries of the immediate beneficiaries, the tax-exempt project administrators.”

--from Ferdinand Lundberg’s 1975 book, The Rockefeller Syndrome

“When I congratulated George [H.W.] Bush on his election as vice-president in 1980, I said I hoped he didn’t mind receiving correspondence from a member of the Trilateral Commission, to which he belonged. He scrawled a card of thanks, and said, `”Sh-sh-sh” about the Trilateral stuff.’ I have kept this exchange secret until now.”

--from then-Trilateral Commission Member Hedley Donovan’s 1989 book, The Right Place, The Right Time

“…Any new clients will be dealing with Rockefeller Financial Services, the trade name of Rockefeller & Co.. Some $7 billion of Rockefeller Financial's $35 billion pile are "assets under management"; the rest are assets under advisement or administration. Rockefeller provides its 298 clients…service through its portfolio-tracking product for wealthy families, Rockit Solutions.

“Rockefeller…still believes in running its own funds in 10 core areas, such as global equities and fixed income. David Harris, Rockefeller's chief investment officer, says large multinationals with their triple-A ratings and mountains of cash need to be viewed as `the new sovereigns’…The firm claims that its global funds are stars, but it keeps a lid on details…Rockefeller reluctantly produced a `confidential’ performance sheet on its 10 core funds but barred us from publishing the results…”

 
--from a September 15, 2012 Barron’s.com article by Richard C. Morais

“Trimble's Force 22E… provides military integrators of munitions, unmanned vehicles, and mobile communications systems with a small, light weight solution for GPS-based navigation and timing… The Force 22E is backward compatible with its predecessor, the proven Force 22 receiver. The addition of a massive fast acquisition correlator and an ICD-167 SHCI interface, makes the Force 22E the most powerful military receiver available in this small size….”

--from the Trimble Navigation Limited/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems, Inc. website

Columbia University’s Rockefeller-Trimble Military and Advanced Systems’ Connection: Trilateral Commission’s Merit Janow Named Columbia SIPA Dean—Part 2

Columbia University’s new School of International and Public Affairs[SIPA] dean—Trilateral Commission member and Rockefeller & Co. corporate board member Merit Janow—may not be eager to encourage many Columbia students or members of the public to study how the Rockefeller Dynasty has obtained, increased and preserved its excessive wealth, historically. Nor will Columbia’s new SIPA dean likely be eager to fully disclose to either the academic community at Columbia or the public too many details about Rockefeller & Co./Rockefeller Financial Service’s 10 core global funds.

But according to an article by Richard Morais, titled “Rock of Ages”, that was posted on the Barron’s.com website on September 15, 2012, since the start of the endless U.S. economic recession in 2008, “Rockefeller’s assets under advisement and administration actually rose 52%, to $35 billion, in the three years through this past June [2012];” and “seven global-equity and small-cap funds” of Rockefeller & Co./Rockefeller Financial Services “have consistently outperformed indexes over long periods of time.”

During this same U.S. economic recession another corporation on whose board of directors Columbia’s new SIPA dean has sat in recent years—Trimble Navigation Limited/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems [TMAS]—has also apparently been making a lot of money by manufacturing weapons for the Pentagon’s endless drone war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other foreign countries.

Between 2008 and early 2012, for example, the TMAS firm—that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trimble Navigation Limited corporation on whose corporate Columbia SIPA Dean Janow has sat since 2008—apparently accepted 50 contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense—whose total worth exceeded $6.6 million—to produce military weaponry-related products. (end of part 2)

Columbia University's Rockefeller-Trimble Military and Advanced Systems' Connection: Trilateral Commision's Merit Janow Named Columbia SIPA Dean--Part 1

“In 1973 the Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller, Chase Manhattan Bank chairman, [former Columbia University Professor] Zbignew Brzezinski…and other like-minded `eminent private citizens.'… Members…are drawn from international business and banking, government, academia, media, and conservative labor. The Commission's purpose is to engineer an enduring partnership among the ruling classes of North America, Western Europe, and Japan-hence the term `trilateral'-in order to safeguard the interests of Western capitalism in an explosive world. The private Trilateral Commission is attempting to mold public policy…Trilateralists are saying: (1) the people, governments, and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations; (2) control over economic resources spells power in modern politics (of course, good citizens are supposed to believe as they are taught; namely, that political equality exists in Western democracies whatever the degree of economic inequality); and (3) the leaders of capitalist democracies-systems where economic control and profit, and thus political power, rest with the few-must resist movement toward a truly popular democracy….”

--Holly Sklar in 1980

“Barack Obama appointed eleven members of…Trilateral Commission to top-level… positions in his administration within his first ten days in office… Within two weeks of his inauguration, Obama’s appointments encompassed more than 12 percent of Commission’s entire US membership…Since the Carter administration, Trilateralists have held these very influential positions: Six of the last eight World Bank Presidents; Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States (except for Obama and Biden); over half of all US Secretaries of State; and three quarters of the Secretaries of Defense….”

--the Project Censored website

“John D. Rockefeller's family office, Rockefeller & Co., was founded in 1882. It began selling its expertise to other families in 1980, and by mid-2008 it had $28 billion of clients' assets under its hood….In September 2009, as the financial crisis raged, Rockefeller's chief executive, James S. McDonald, shot himself behind a car dealership in Dartmouth, Mass.

“While world markets continued their downward spiral, it took a year for the Rockefeller Family Trust, which owns 100% of the multifamily office's voting rights, to get McDonald's successor in place….”

--from a September 15, 2012 Barron’s com article by Richard C. Morais

“As the Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, Reuben Jeffery III, serves as the senior economic official at the State Department. Mr. Jeffery advises the Secretary of State on international economic policy…He also serves as the State Department's Coordinator for International Energy Affairs.

 
“Nominated by President Bush on April 16, 2007, and confirmed by the Senate on June 21, 2007, Mr. Jeffery was sworn into office by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on June 27….Mr. Jeffery previously served as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for International Economic Affairs at the National Security Council. Mr. Jeffery also acted as the Representative and Executive Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority Office (CPA) at the Pentagon, after having served as an advisor to Ambassador Bremer in Iraq…’

--from a biography of Rockefeller & Co. CEO and board member Reuben Jeffery III that was posted on the U.S. State Department website in 2007

“TMAS is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trimble Navigation Limited, which develops advanced GPS solutions for the defense aerospace industry. TMAS products incorporate a common 24-Channel GPS engine that is capable of simultaneously tracking all signals from all GPS satellites in view.

“High-performance products, innovative technology, and proven experience in the field make Trimble a trusted supplier for US and Allied military GPS users worldwide. Over the last decade, armed forces around the world have procured more than 50,000 military receivers from Trimble.”

--from the Trimble Navigation Limited/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems, Inc. website


“Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger has appointed Merit E. Janow as the next dean of the University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), effective July 1."

—from the Columbia University website on May 17, 2013

Columbia University’s Rockefeller-Trimble Military and Advanced Systems’ Connection: Trilateral Commission’s Merit Janow Named Columbia SIPA Dean—Part 1

Like a former Special Assistant to former Republican President George W. Bush and a former advisor to U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Paul Bremer named Reuben Jeffery III, Columbia University’s new School of International and Public Affairs [SIPA] Dean Merit Janow is a member of the undemocratically selected Trilateral Commission elite group that David Rockefeller founded in 1973.

And like Bush and Bremer’s former advisor Jeffery, Trilateral Commission member Janow also sits next to David Rockefeller, David Rockefeller Jr., Mark Rockefeller and Michael Rockefeller on the board of directors of the Rockefeller Dynasty’s Rockefeller & Co.; which, according to its website, apparently seeks to increase both the Rockefeller family’s wealth and the wealth of “select investors outside of the Rockefeller family,” by investing and managing “approximately $35 billion in assets.”

Besides being a member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and the corporate board of Rockefeller & Co., Columbia University’s new SIPA dean has also been a member in recent years of the corporate boards of Nasdaq Exchange LLC, the Capital Income Building Fund, the World Growth and Income Fund, the American Fund Insurance Series and the American Fund Target Date Retirement Fund. In addition, SIPA Dean Janow has, since 2008, sat on the board of directors of the Sunnyvale, California-based Trimble Navigation Limited/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems [TMAS], Inc corporation (that has produced weapons for the endless U.S. military’s drone war in Afghanistan and other countries in recent years). As a February 7, 2008 press release of Trimble Navigation Limited/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems noted:

“Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) announced today it has appointed Merit E. Janow to serve on its Board of Directors effective March 1, 2008….

“`We are pleased to welcome Merit to Trimble's Board of Directors,’ said Steven W. Berglund, president and CEO of Trimble. `The aggressive development of our international markets is core to Trimble's strategy in all of our segments. Merit's demonstrated global expertise, experience and insight will enable her to make a significant contribution to the Board.’…”

 
According to the Forbes magazine website, in 2011, Columbia’s new SIPA dean was apparently paid $54,000 in compensation and $228,000 in stock as compensation for sitting on the board of directors of Trimble Navigation Limited/Trimble Military and Advanced Systems. And, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' Open Secrets website, SIPA Dean Janow apparently made a campaign contribution of $1,000 to GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush's campaign on June 30, 1999 and a campaign contribution of $2,000 to former Republican President George W. Bush's re-election campaign on August 12, 2003. (end of part 1)

Hidden History of Texas: 1974-1995--Part 18

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on April 30, 2013)

Between 1970 and 1990 the number of African-Americans who lived in Texas increased from 1.4 million to 2 million, but the percentage of Texas residents who were African-Americans remained at 12 percent. More African-Americans lived in Texas in 1990 than in any other state except for New York and California, and 90 percent of African-Americans in Texas lived in towns and cities by 1990.

Although the percentage of African-Americans in Texas who were registered voters dropped from 83 percent in 1968 to around 65 percent during the 1980s, the number of African-Americans who held political office in Texas increased from 45 in 1971 to 472 in 1992. And even though no African-American was elected to serve as a Governor of Texas or a U.S. Senator from Texas between 1970 and 1995, an African-American, Barbara Jordan, had been elected by 1972 to represent one of Texas’s congressional districts in the House of Representatives.


By 1985, 15 African-Americans had been elected to sit in the Texas state legislature, and by 1990 there were 12 African-American mayors and 138 African-American city council members in various cities and towns in Texas. In Austin, the first African-American man to sit on the Austin City Council since the 1880s -- Berl Handcox -- had been elected in 1971.

The first African-American mayor of Dallas, former Texas Secretary of State Ron Kirk (who later became the U.S. Trade Ambassador in the Democratic Obama Administration), was elected in 1995. In addition, between 1990 and 1992, an African-American woman named Marguerite Ross Barnett was the president of the University of Houston, and in 1991 the birthday of Martin Luther King was made a state holiday in Texas.

Yet between 1960 and 1984, the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had decreased from 15,000 to 5,000, and as late as 1993 “the University of Texas at Austin could count only 52 African-Americans among its faculty of 2,300 -- about 2 percent,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. In addition, “in Austin , expansion of the University of Texas into an African-American community displaced people into more crowded neighborhoods” between 1974 and 1995, according to the same book.

Around 30 percent of all African-Americans who lived in Texas in 1990 still lived in poverty; and in 1987, the U.S. Equal Opportunities Commission office in Dallas still received 5,800 complaints of racial discrimination from African-Americans who lived in Texas.

Of the 37,532 people locked inside state and federal prisons in Texas in 1985, 36 percent were African-American prisoners; and 29 percent of all the imprisoned people in Texas who were executed by the State of Texas in the 1980s and early 1990s were African-Americans. Historically, “261 of 316 men executed by Texas between 1924 and 1995 were black,” according to Black Texans.

In addition, while 9 percent of college students in Texas were African-American in 1993, between 1985 and 1991 the percentage of people locked inside Texas prisons who were African-American had increased from 36 to 41 percent. And in 1990, 40 percent of all African-American families in Texas were now headed by women.

The total number of people imprisoned in state and federal prisons in Texas increased from 16,833 to 127,766 (including 7,935 female prisoners) between 1974 and 1995; and, between 1991 and 1996, Texas -- whose imprisoned population grew by 156 percent during these five years -- was the state with the highest percentage increase in the number of people incarcerated during this historical period.

In the 1980 Ruiz v. Estelle court decision, “the entire state prison system” of Texas “was declared unconstitutional on overcrowding and conditions,” according to the ACLU National Prison Project’s 1995 “Status Report: State Prisons and the Courts;” and, in 1996, Texas -- with an incarceration rate of 686 prisoners per every 100,000 residents -- was the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the United States.

Between 1970 and 1985, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 250,000 to 436,000 and “from 1980 to 1990, Austin’s Jewish-affiliated population more than doubled, from 2,100 to 5,000,” according to an essay by Cathy Schechter, titled “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell,’” that appeared in Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth Roseman’s book Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas.

By 1988, around 90,000 people of Jewish religious background now lived in Texas, according to the www.texasalmanac.com website, and of the nearly 17 million people who lived in Texas in 1990, around 108,000 were now of Jewish religious background.

Despite the continued presence of local anti-war movement activists in Austin in the 1980s, “Lockheed Austin Division [LAD] was formed in August 1981 by Lockheed Missiles & Space Companies to develop military tactical support programs and systems” in Austin;” and the programs under development at LAD in the 1980s fell “under two general headings of command and control systems and target location systems,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

The same book also revealed that “the equipment developed through these programs [was] used to provide military commanders with current information on the location of military units within their operating area”“employment reached 2,000 by July 1984” and a year later the number of LAD employees: had “risen to 2,500.”

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Did RFK Plan To Re-Open JFK Assassination Case?

Prior to being mysteriously eliminated in June 1968 from U.S. Establishment politics, New York U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy may have been planning to re-open the JFK assassination case, if elected president in November 1968. According to Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK by Warren Hinckle and William Turner:

"...Publicly Bobby [Kennedy] took the stance that he believed in the Warren Report even though he hadn't read it, but privately he seethed...

"...He had confided to campaign aide Richard Lubic, who was with him in the Ambassador Hotel pantry the night he was shot, that he would reopen the case once he was elected. On May 28, 1968, a week before he was shot, he disappeared for several hours in Oxnard, California to check privately on a report that a telephone call warning of the assassination had originated there on the morning of November 22, 1963..."

In an interview that appeared in the July 9, 1969 issue of the now-defunct East Village Other alternatiave newspaper [which was reprinted in Our Time: An Anthology of Interviews from the `East Village Other'], Mark Lane also asserted:

"Robert Kennedy sent two emissaries to see Jim Garrison at two different times after he had declared for the presidency...Robert Kennedy wanted Jim to know that if he were elected President, he would apprehend and prosecute those responsible for killing his brother. He also wanted Jim to know that he supported the New Orleans investigation...The interesting thing is that both of them carried the same phrase from Senator Kennedy; the phrase was: `I can't say anything now, there are guns between me and the White House.'"


(Downtown 7/13/94)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: How CIA's Tokyo Station Reacted To JFK's Death

In Chapter VI of its report, the Warren Commission stated the following:

"Director John A. McCone and Deputy Director Richard Helms of the Central Intelligence Agency testified before the commission that no one connected with the CIA had ever interviewed Oswald or communicated with him in any way. In his supplementing affidavit, Director McCone stated unequivocally that Oswald was not an agent, employee, or informant of the CIA, that the Agency never communicated with him in any manner or furnished him any compensation, and that Oswald was never directly or indirectly associated with the CIA..."

Yet Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K. by Warren Hinckle and William Turner described the reaction at the CIA's Tokyo Station to news of JFK's death on November 22, 1963 by stating the following:

"There was joy in the CIA's Tokyo Station...`The conservatives were obviously elated and there was talk of an invasion of Cuba,' said Jim Wilcott, the Tokyo Station financial officer in 1963. According to Wilcott, CIA hardliners `hated Jack Kennedy' because they felt he betrayed the agency over the Bay of Pigs. Agents were breaking out bottles and having drinks to Oswald. Tongues became loose, and there was a great deal of talk about Oswald's connections with the CIA. It was accepted as given that Oswald worked for the agency. This is what Wilcott says he learned:

"`Oswald was originally under control of the Tokyo Station's Soviet Russia Branch. He was trained at Atsugi Naval Air Station, the secret base for Tokyo CIA special operations...When Oswald returned from the USSR in June of 1962, he was brought back to Japan for debriefing. They were having some kind of difficulty with Oswald...He became difficult to handle...'"

The same book noted the following:

"Wilcott told the authors that at first he found it difficult to accept that the man who was said to have shot the president [JFK] worked for the CIA. `Then I heard about more and more employees who had been working on the Oswald project in the late 1950s.' Part of Wilcott's job was to hand out cash for covert CIA operations. `When I expressed disbelief, they told me, "`Well, Jim, so and so drew an advance from you for Oswald'" or "`You gave out money for the Oswald project under such and such a crypto.'"'"

The Deadly Secrets book by Warren Hinckle and William Turner also asserted that "Nixon may have felt the need to cover up Watergate because an investigation would have exposed CIA misdeeds" and "such an investigation would have divulged the deadliest secret of the 20th Century--the government entanglements with organized crime, the mob-CIA plots to kill Fidel Casatro, and the great backfire when the mob and the CIA plotters turned on President Kennedy and murdered him in Dallas."

(Downtown 6/29/94 and 7/13/94)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Jack Ruby's Mysterious Cancer Death

The man who silenced the apparently CIA-linked Lee Oswald on November 24, 1963--the apparently CIA-linked Jack Ruby--died of cancer on January 3, 1967. As Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs recalled:

"On December 9, 1966, two days after his new trial site had been announced, Ruby was moved from the Dallas County Jail to Parkland Hospital after complaining of persistent coughing and nausea.

"Docotrs initially diagnosed his problem as `pneumonia.' The next day, however, the diagnosis was changed to cancer...

"Bruce McCarty operated an electron microscope at Southwest Medical School near Parkland...He was called back to work during the holidays in 1966 to make a study of Ruby's cancer cells...

"McCarty confirmed that Ruby's cells were microvilli, indicating his cancer originated in the digestive system. He was shocked when it was announced that Ruby died from lung cancer.

"Could Ruby have been injected with live cancer cells, which could account for the presence of the microvilli?...

"While none of this information established beyond doubt that Jack Ruby was somehow eliminated through cancer, it certainly shows there is cause enough for researchers to be highly suspicious of his sudden and convenient death..."

The same book also observed:

"At least one former Dallas lawman offered a more mundane explanation for Ruby's sudden and rampant cancer. He told another: `...They just took Ruby in for X-rays...While he sat there for 15 or 20 minutes or more, they just left the X-ray machine on him.'"

(Downtown 6/29/94)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Revisiting 1993 Cuban TV Documentary

In an article entitled "New Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination" (Granma International 12/8/93), Gabriel Molina described what was contained in a three-part Cuban tv documentary on assassination attempts against former Cuban President Fidel Castro, that was broadcast on Cuban tv in 1993:

"General Fabian Escalanate Font, former head of the Cuban State Security, declared that Cuban counter-revolutionaries and Mafia henchmen, who were manipulated by certain CIA leaders and who had participated in plots to kill Fidel [Castro] were part of the conspiracy surrounding the Kennedy assassination...

"Escalante's sensational accusation pointed to Cubans Eladio del Valle Gutierrez and Herminio Diaz Garcia (both dead, the first murdered under mysterious circumstances) as the gunmen who acted on November 22, 1963, with or without Oswald. It is true that Wilcott, a former CIA officer, saw Oswald at one of the intelligence agency's camps in Japan. That wasn't the only evidence of links between Oswald and the U.S. intelligence agencies or between Jack Ruby, his executioner, and the Mafia. The groups was rounded out by Chicago Mafiosi Lenny Patrick and David Yaras, and by Richard Gaines.

"According to Escalante, another group involved in the presidential assassination  [of JFK] included Cuban-American Frank Sturgis, an important figure in the Bay of Pigs invasion and one of the Watergate `plumbers,' Orlando Bosch and the two Novo brothers, Ignacio and Guillermo, all three of whom are known terrorists; and Dave Phillips, a former head of the CIA for the western hemisphere...

"Escalante also claims that the role of organizer was played by, among others, Richard Helms and Richard Bissell, director and deputy director of the agency, respectively, and Mafia heads Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana and John Roselli."

(Downtown 1/5/94)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Who Used Secret Service Credentials On November 22, 1963?

Coincidentally, a former Secret Service Special Agent named Abraham Bolden--who was assigned to the White House Detail in the early 1960s--apparently told A Citizen's Dissent author Mark Lane on December 4, 1967 that "it had been widely known in the Secret Service that an unauthorized person had used Secret Service credentials in Dallas on November 22 [1963]."

PBS's Bill Moyers And Coverage of JFK Assassination

One reason long-time PBS show producer Bill Moyers may still not apparently be very eager to examine what may have really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 on his tv show might be because Moyers, coincidentally, was personally involved in the post-assassination shift of presidential power to Lyndon Baines Johnson. As LBJ's Inner Circle by Charles Robert recalled:

"Johnson's lengthening shadow began to take shape in Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 minutes after Kenneth O'Donnell, appointments secretary to President Kennedy, first addressed him as `Mr. President'--to inform him that President Kennedy was dead...

"`Get me Jack Valenti,' he told a friend before leaving the hospital to ride head down on the back seat of an unmarked police car to Love Field. And so Jack J. Valenti...who had ridden in the doomed Dallas motorcade as the Vice-President's guest, became the first post-assassination addition to President Johnson's staff...

"At Love Field...he picked up another trustted Texan, Bill D. Moyers, for the return trip to Washington. Moyers, a Johnson protege'...had been in Austin, Texas, advancing the President's scheduled visit. When he heard of the assassination, he `naturally' flew to Johnson's side. That's where he and Valenti were when LBJ...gave his first presidential order: `Now let's get airborne!'

"...After the President had written out in long hand the...57-word statement he wasa to make on his arrival in Washington...he questioned its adequacy...with Bill Moyers..."

At The White House by Robert Pierpoint also noted that "If anyone had a close working and personal relationship with LBJ it was Moyers" and "Moyers persistently tried to put a humane face on an increasingly inhumane war, explaining the president's Vietnam policies in the most acceptable terms possible."

(Downtown 12/22/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: `Newsweek''s 1993 Coverage

In a 1993 "special investigation report," Newsweek magazine (11/22/93) asserted that "Kennedy was almost certainly killed by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone" and "When Tippit stopped him, Oswald shot him." Yet Double Cross by Sam and Chuck Giancana stated the following in 1992:

"Mooney said that the `alleged lone gunman,' Lee Harvey Oswald, like Ruby, had ties to both the CIA and the Outfit...The short of it, Mooney said, was that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent.

"Oswald had been a spy for the U.S. government in the Soviet Union, and had been trained to speak fluent Russian...In truth, Mooney said `Lee Harvey Oswald was a right-wing supporter of the `Kill Castro, Bay of Pigs camp'...`CIA all the way.'...

"Mooney now confided that..each man involved in the assassination plot received fifty thousand dollars...from wealthy right-wing Texas oilmen. Precisely who these financiers were, however, Mooney never disclosed.

"In the early spring of 1963, when the decision was reached by Mooney and his CIA associates to finalize plans for their elimination of the President [JFK], Oswald was the natural choice as a fall guy. `They'd already laid the groundwork to make him look like a Commie nut...so they figured it would be no problem to convince people he was a Commie.'...

"Mooney said the entire conspiracy went `right up to the top of the CIA'...

"Mooney said both `Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson knew about the whole damned thing,' having met with him several times in Dallas immediately prior to the assassination...

"To eliminate Oswald, Mooney said the CIA had selected White and Tippiet...on the Dallas police force...They were to murder the `lone gunman.' However, Tippit had wavered, Mooney said, allowing Oswald to escape. Thus, White had been forced to kill his partner. `Probably the only real screwup in the whole goddamned deal.'

"`And the rest is history,' Mooney said grinning. `...There was a line into the CIA. If somebody knew too much, the CIA found out about it and took care of the problem'..."

(Downtown 12/8/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Gary Underhill's Mysterious Death

Among the mysterious deaths related to the apparent JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up was the strange death of Gary Underhill. As Jim Marrs recalled in his Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy book:

"One strange incident involved an operative named Gary Underhill...At the time of the assassination, Underhill performed `special assignments' for the CIA and was on close terms with officials of both the Agency and the Pentagon. Several days after the assassination Underhill visited friends in New Jersey. He was badly shaken and fearful. He said that President Kennedy had been killed by a small group within the CIA and that he believed his life was in danger. A short time later, Underhill was found fatally shot in his Washington apartment..."

JFK Assassination `Prophet' Dixon's CIA Connection

Following the assassination of JFK, Jeane Dixon gained some fame for having "predicted" the event. As A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeane Dixon by Ruth Montgomery noted in 1965:

"It was a bright, crisp day in late November. The luncheon had been scheduled several weeks in advance...Mrs. Harley Cope, widow of a rear admiral, and Jeane Dixon, Washington's famous seeress, ordered eggs Florentine...

"The...brunette leaned back against her chair and closed her eyes. `...Something dreadful is going to happen to the president today...'

"Jeane could only nod miserably, while Mrs. Cope explained. `Mrs. Dixon had been foreseeing a tragedy for President Kennedy very soon...'"

Coincidentally, the same book also revealed that prior to November 22, 1963, the CIA-backed Cuban exile leader Mario Garcia Kohly visited Dixon in her office. And in his 1980 book Conspiracy, Anthony Summers wrote:

"In 1978 I interviewed the son of the late Mario Kohly...The younger Kohly recalled opening a bottle of champagne at the news of President Kennedy's death and then calling his father. According to Kohly, `My father seemed elated and quite relieved, he seemed more pleased, I would say, than surprised. I am sure he had knowledge of what really happened in Dealey Plaza...'"

Summers also observed that Kohly's son quoted the deceased CIA-backed Cuban exile leader as saying "John Kennedy was a traitor...He was a Communist."

(Downtown 11/10/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Was Oswald Drinking A Coke When JFK Was Shot?

According to chapter 1 of the Warren Commission Report, within 2 minutes after JFK was shot Dallas Patrolman Marrion Baker had "reached the second-floor landing" of the Texas School Book Depository, "caught a glimpse of someone through the small glass window in the door separating the hall area near the stairs from the small vestibule leading into the lunchroom" and "reached to the door and saw a man about 20 feet away walking toward the other end of the lunchroom" who "was emptyhanded" and whose "name was Lee Harvey Oswald."

Yet according to the December 1, 1963 issue of the Washington Post--which was published before the Warren Commission Report was finalized--"a policeman ran into" the Texas School Book Depository "building immediately after the shots were fired," "scrambled up the stairs to the second floor" and "saw Oswald standing beside a soft-drink machine, sipping from a coke bottle." But it was physically impossible for anyone who was already sipping from a coke bottle when Patrolman Baker saw him on November 22, 1963 to have also been at the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository at the moment JFK was shot.

Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Assassination by Josiah Thompson also observed in 1967:

"The chief objections to the commission's case against Oswald have been known for a long time. The lack of fingerprints on the rifle, the extremely small time interval between the last shot and Oswald's encounter with Superintendent Roy Truly and Police Officer Marrion Baker on the second floor of the depository, the difficulties in accounting for when and how he brought the rifle into the building, his relatively poor skill as a marksman--all these points have long led assassination researchers to look with skepticism on the presumption of Oswald's guilt..."

The same book also noted that--before the Warren Commision Report was finalized--NBC News had originally reported two hours after JFK was shot that "a bullet struck him in front as he faced the assailant."

(Downtown 11/10/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: The JFK Assassination Cover Story?

In his 1992 book, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, Retired U.S. Air Force Col. L. Fletcher Prouty stated the following:

"The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was one of the truly cataclysmic events of this century [the 20th century]...Most thinking people of this country, and of the world, believe that he was not killed by a lone gunman. Despite that view, the cover story created and thrust upon us by the spokesmen of this High Cabal has existed for three decades [as of the 1990s]. It has come from the lips of every president and from the top media representatives and their spokesmen...Consider the pressure it must take to require all of them...to quote the words of that contrived cover story over and over again for nearly three decades [as of the 1990s]..."

Yet Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs asserts that "Unless we, as a nation, come to a truthful understanding of what happened to our chief elected official in 1963, we obviously cannot begin to correctly understand the events that are affecting us today..."

(Downtown 11/24/93)

Former U.S. Agent Produced CBS's JFK Assassination Show In 1993

After graduating from Yale, a former Washington Post National Security reporter named Walter Pincus apparently worked as a U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Agent during the 1950s. And in November 1993, CBS News televised a show called "Who Killed JFK? The Final Report", which former U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Agent Pincus helped produce and Dan Rather narrated. So, not surprisingly, this CBS News show did not allow many Warren Report critics to get on the screen to either debate with Warren Report defender Gerald Posner or explain why they thought CBS News was still trying to cover-up the truth of what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

But being a Warren Report defender apparently can be quite lucrative. Warren Report defender and former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, for example, was offered a 10-year, $22 million contract by CBS in 1981.

(Downtown 12/8/93)

Hidden History of Texas: 1954-1973--Part 17

Between 1950 and 1970, the number of people who lived in Texas increased from 7,711,194 to 11,196,730. Although the percentage of people living Texas who were African-Americans decreased from 13 to 12 percent between 1950 and 1970, the number of African-Americans who lived in Texas increased from 977,458 to about 1.4 million during the same period. And by 1970 the percentage of people living in Texas who were Latino was now 18 percent, as the number of Latino people who lived in Texas increased from about 1 million to about 2 million between 1950 and 1970. But the number of people of Jewish religious background who lived in Texas in the early 1970s was still only about 71,000.

By 1970, 80 percent of all people in Texas lived in urban cities or towns. Between 1950 and 1970, for example, the number of people living in Houston increased from 596,163 to 1,232,802 and the number of people living in Dallas increased from 434,462 to 844,401; while the number of people who lived in Austin by 1970 was now 250,000 and around 43,000 students now attended the University of Texas in Austin . Around 317,000 African-Americans lived in Houston by 1970; and by 1970, around 210,000 African-Americans now lived in Dallas . Of  Beaumont ’s residents in 1970, about 30 percent were also now African-American. In addition, over 3 million people who lived in Texas in 1970 had not been born in Texas . But only 1,092,596 of these 3 million “transplants” or migrants to Texas had not been born in the southern region of the United States .

Despite the increase in civil rights movement and New Left student and counter-cultural activism that developed in Texas between 1953 and the late 1960s, during the 1950s some of the ultra-right and/or ultra-rich folks in Texas (who had made big money from Texas’s oil industry in the 1930s and 1940s) apparently began using some of their surplus wealth to both begin building a “New Right” conservative right-wing movement in the United States and to exercise a special political influence over the Republican Eisenhower White House. As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich recalled:


“In 1955, with money raised from his father and friend, including a Houston oilman named Lloyd Smith, [William F.] Buckley would found The National Review, which became the crucible for conservative thoughts…The Old family friend confirmed rumors that [former Columbia University and U.S. President Dwight D.] Eisenhower invested with [Sid] Richardson beginning sometime during World War II… Texas oilmen smelled a winner in Eisenhower. By one estimate Richardson funneled about $1 million into the campaign, not including $200,000 to cover Eisenhower’s various stays at the Commodore Hotel in New York or his expenses during the Republican convention in Chicago …”

Coincidentally, in their 1968 book, The Case Against Congress, Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson noted that “the upkeep of the Eisenhower farm” in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania “was paid for by three oilmen,” “during his 8 years in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower did more for the nation’s private oil and gas interests than any other President,” and “he encouraged and signed legislation overriding a Supreme Court decision giving offshore oil to the Federal Government.”

Also coincidentally, Texas Gov. John Connally, who had been employed by Texas oil billionaire Sid Richardson during the 1950s, helped plan JFK’s ill-fated visit to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 (and was, himself, hit by gunfire on that day). As even the Warren Commission Report noted:

“The basic decision on the November trip to Texas was made at a meeting of President Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson and Governor Connally on June 5, 1963 at the Cortez Hotel in El Paso, Texas…The three agreed that the President would come to Texas in late November 1963…When Governor Connally called at the White House on Oct. 4 to discuss the details of the visit, it was agreed that the planning of events in Texas would be left largely to the Governor…Shots fired from a rifle mortally wounded President Kennedy…Mrs. Connally heard a second shot fired and pulled her husband down into her lap…Governor Connally…cried out, `Oh, no, no, no. My God, THEY are going to kill us ALL.’”

And, a former college roommate of Texas Gov. Connally, Henry Wade, was, also coincidentally, Dallas ’s District Attorney on Nov. 22, 1963. Harrison Edward Livingstone even made the following allegation about the historical role of some influential folks from Texas on U.S. national politics in the 1960s in his High Treason 2: The Great Cover-Up:

“The conspiracy that killed President Kennedy was at least to some extent hatched and operated out of Dallas/Fort Worth. The plotters controlled the police and the city government there. Numerous of their relatives and connections were in the military and in the CIA…Some of them, like General Charles Cabell of Dallas [whose brother Earle Cabell was the Mayor of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963], had been fired by Kennedy. The Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, David Atlee Phillips, and numerous others from the CIA were from Dallas or Fort Worth .”

The Big Rich also indicated the long-range impact that H.L. Hunt’s right-wing LIFELINE radio network of the 1950s and early 1960s apparently had on the drift of U.S. domestic politics after the late 1970s:

“…LIFELINE was in many ways ahead of its time. Its wedding of fundamentalist Protestantism and right-wing politics, not to mention its crusade against `big government’ and Wall Street greed, came 20 years before the Christian Right’s emergence in the late 1970s…By the early 1960s its broadcasts could be heard on 354 stations in 47 states…”

By 1973, corporations like IBM, Texas Instruments, Tracor and Motorola were utilizing the labor of a lot of workers in Texas —and often some lucrative Defense Department war contracts—to make a lot of big money in Texas . Motorola, for example, employed 6,000 workers in Austin by 1973; and Texas Instruments “began business in Austin in 1966 with a Defense System engineering operation” and the first TI-owned building in Austin “was completed in 1968 at 2601 North Lamar and continued the expansion of Defense Systems engineering and drafting,” according to David Humphrey's Austin: An Illustrated History. Yet two years later student and non-student anti-war activists in Austin were still able to mobilize over 25,000 people to participate in the then-largest anti-war demonstration in Austin ’s history in May 1970. But as a result of LBJ’s decision to begin a bombing campaign in Southeast Asia and order hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Vietnam in 1965, 3,415 people from Texas ended up being killed in action during the Vietnam War.

Coincidentally, during the 1970s Texas Instruments was also the third-largest non-unionized company in the USA . And according to the 1980 edition of Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz and Robert Levering’s book Everybody’s Business: The Irreverent Guide To Corporate America, labor organizers who had “spent 25 years and $3 million trying to make inroads” said there was then no union at Texas Instruments because the company had “one of the most effective anti-union operations in the country;” and during the 1970s, “Texas Instruments employees were paid 25 percent less than comparable IBM workers across town,” “had to work mandatory overtime and 2 Saturdays a month,” and “were afraid to talk about a union.”

Revisiting History of Korea Again--Conclusion

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea between 1993 and 2003:

"From 1993 through 1994...the Clinton administration's Pentagon drew up Operations Plan 5027, designed to attack and destroy North Korea's nuclear facilities. It was estimated that such an attack could lead to full-scale war in which `as many as one million people would be killed, including 80,000 to 100,000 Americans...' When Seoul protested strongly and refussed any part in the contemplated war, the United States was obliged to negotiate...

"...William Perry, secretary of defense in the Clinton administration between 1994 and 1997, was appointed...to advise on North Korea policy. After an intensive, eight-month study and a visit to Pyongyang, his report cleared Pyongyang of suspicion over alleged secret nuclear development, confirmed that it had abided by the freeze.

 
"...The initial and crucial breaches were American ones. The introduction of nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula in the first place, the refusal to take seriously its obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty to `negotiate in good faith to achieve a precise result--nuclear disarmament in all its aspects' and the inclusion of North Korea on the nuclear target list were all breaches of the Non Proliferation Treaty. The United States was also in breach of the Agreed Framework by its dilatoriness at the planned light-water reactor site...

"...For more than a decade, the United States insisted that North Korea had `one, possibly two' nuclear weapons. In 2003, however, U.S. intelligence shifted to adopt the South Korean, Russian, and Chinese view: that it actually did not have any at all...

"...Until 2003 North Korea did not, apparently, actually enrich any uranium, much less produce any weapons. As for the Yangbyon reactor, the plutonium-generating program and the reactor waste pools were frozen, as promised, between 1994 and 2003..."

Revisiting History of Korea Again--Part 6

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea since the late 1950s:

"North Korea, the more industrialized region of the peninsula prior to the Korean War, surpassed the southern Republic of Korea in growth during the 1950s and 1960s...

"North Korea's uniqueness...lies first of all in the way it has...lived under the shadow of nuclear threat longer than any other nation. During the Korean War it escaped nuclear annihilation by the barest of margins...Just four years later, and in obvious breaach of the Armistice, the United States introduced nuclear artillery shells, mines, and missiles into Korea, and it added periodically thereafter to a stockpile kept adjacent to the Demilitarized Zone and designed to intimidate the nonnuclear North. When these nuclear weapons were finally withdrawn in 1991...the United States openly continued its rehearsals for a long-range nuclear strike on North Korea..."

Revisiting History of Korea Again--Part 5

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...The UN forces flouted the rules of war by allowing or encouraging South Korean forces to engage in widespread massacres and torture, the details of which are as yet only slowly being revealed. The United States itself committed a series of war crimes, only partially acknowledged and never in any way expiated, by attacking civilian population centers, refugee columns, and the North's civil infrastructure including dams and food supplies (crimes for which German officers had been executed only a few years before)...

 
"...Between three and four million people died, most of them Korean civilians, and ten million were cut off from their families on either side of the cease-fire line. In proportional terms, North Korea suffered greater losses of population than either the Soviet Union or Poland in the Second World War. The American losses were long put at 54,000 men...but in 2000 these figures were mysteriously scaled back to 36,940, with the explanation that by a clerical error all U.S. military deaths during those years had been counted as Korean War deaths..."

Black Youth Unemployment Rate Jumps To 40.5 Percent In April 2013

The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Black youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age jumped from 33.8 to 40.5 percent between March and April 2013; while the official jobless rate for all Black workers (youth, female and male) in the United States was still 13.2 percent in April 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data.

Between April 2012 and April 2013, the official jobless rate for all Black workers in the United States increased from 13.1 to 13.2 percent; while the official number of unemployed Black workers in the United States increased by 62,000 (from 2,388,000 to 2,450,000) during the same period. In addition, the number of Black workers not in the U.S. labor force increased by 147,000 (from 11,526,000 to 11,673,000) between April 2012 and April 2013.

Between March and April 2013, the official number of unemployed Black youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age increased by 46,000 (from 241,000 to 287,000); while the number of Black youths who still have jobs decreased by 49,000 (from 472,000 to 423,000) during the same period.

The official unemployment rate for Black male workers over 20 years-of-age was still 12.6 percent in April 2013; while the number of Black male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 51,000 (from 7,370,000 to 7,319,000) between March and April 2013. In addition, the number of Black male workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 70,000 (from 8,447,000 to 8,377,000) during the same period; while the official jobless rate for Black female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 11.6 percent in April 2013.

Between April 2012 and April 2013, the official jobless rate for Black female workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 10.7 to 11.6 percent; while the number of Black female workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 15,000 (from 8,440,000 to 8,425,000) during the same period.

The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for white youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 21.8 percent in April 2013; while the official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Latino youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 28 percent during that same month. In addition, between March and April 2013 the number of unemployed Latino youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age increased by 22,000 (from 269,000 to 291,000), according to the “not seasonally adjusted” data.

The official “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Latina female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 7.5 percent in April 2013; while the number of Latina female workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 9,000 (from 9,805,000 to 9,796,000) between March and April 2013.

The official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Latino male workers over 20 years-of-age was still 7.6 percent in April 2013; while the “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all Latino workers (youth, male and female) was still 9 percent during that same month.

The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all white workers (youth, male and female) in the United States was still 6.7 percent in April 2013; while the jobless rate for white male workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 6.1 to 6.4 percent between March and April 2013.

The number of white male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 54,000 (from 60,594,000 to 60,540,000) between March and April 2013; while the number of unemployed white male workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States increased by 180,000 (from 3,955,000 to 4,135,000) during the same period.

The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for white female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 5.7 percent in April 2013; while the number of white female workers over 20 years-of-age in the U.S. labor force decreased by 34,000 (from 54,255,000 to 54,221,000) between March and April 2013.

According to the “not seasonally adjusted” data, the number of Asian-American workers not in the U.S. labor force increased by 89,000 (from 4,699,000 to 4,788,000) between March and April 2013; while the unemployment rate for Asian-American workers increased from 5 to 5.1 percent during that same period. In addition, between March and April 2013 the number of unemployed Asian-American workers in the United States increased by 8,000 (from 423,000 to 431,000); while the number of Asian-American workers who still have jobs decreased by 76,000 (from 8,101,000 to 8,025,000) during the same period, according to the “not seasonally adjusted” data.

The total number of all youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age in the United States who still have jobs decreased by 31,000 (from 4,351,000 to 4,320,000) between March and April 2013, according to the “seasonally adjusted” data; while the number of youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 32,000 (from 11,103,000 to 11,135,000) during the same period. And the official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 24.1 percent in April 2013.

For all male workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States, the official jobless rate increased from 7.6 to 7.7 percent between March and April 2013; while the total number of unemployed male workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States increased by 127,000 (from 6,255,000 to 6,382,000) during that same period. In addition, the total number of male workers over 16 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 90,000 (from 76,329,000 to 76,239,000) between March and April 2013; while the total number of male workers over 16 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 56,000 (from 35,619,000 to 35,675,000) during the same period.

Between March and April 2013, the official unemployment rate for all male workers over 20 years-of-age in the United States also increased from 6.9 to 7.1 percent; while the total number of unemployed male workers over 20 years-of-age increased by 125,000 (from 5,519,000 to 5,644,000) during the same period. In addition, the total number of male workers over 20 years-of-age who still have jobs decreased by 69,000 (from 74,228,000 to 74,159,000); while the total number of male workers over 20 years-of-age not in the U.S. labor force increased by 45,000 (from 29,888,000 to 29,933,000) during the same period.

The official unemployment rate for all female workers over 16 years-of-age in the United States was still 7.3 percent in April 2013; while the official jobless rate for all female workers over 20 years-of-age was still 6.7 percent during that same month. In addition, the official unemployment rate for all U.S. workers was still 7.5 percent and 11,659,000 workers in the United States were still officially unemployed in April 2013.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 3, 2013 press release:
“…The unemployment rate, at 7.5 percent, changed little in April…The number of unemployed persons, at 11.7 million, was also little changed over the month…The rates for adult men (7.1 percent), teenagers (24.1 percent), whites (6.7 percent), blacks (13.2 percent), and Hispanics (9.0 percent) showed little or no change…

“In April, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 278,000 to 7.9 million…These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job…

“In April, 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier…These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey…

“Among the marginally attached, there were 835,000 discouraged workers in April…Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them…

“…Employment changed little over the month in construction, with small offsetting movements in the residential and nonresidential components…Manufacturing employment was unchanged in April.

“Employment in other major industries, including mining and logging, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, financial activities, and government, showed little change over the month…”